“Probably few pianists will have sufficient courage to play them all in succession,” Antonin Dvorak predicted about the 13 sections of his sprawling, nearly hourlong “Poetic Tone Pictures.” But, he added, “only in this way can the listener obtain a proper notion of what I intended, for this time I am not just an absolute composer but also a poet.”
He was correct; since it was written in 1889, “Poetic Tone Pictures” has been taken up by so few pianists, it didn’t arrive at Carnegie Hall until Tuesday evening, as the dreamily kaleidoscopic second half of a recital by Leif Ove Andsnes.
It has been a week of firsts at Carnegie. On Saturday, Yuja Wang accomplished the sensationally unheard-of — at the hall, if not in the world — by muscling through Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos and his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” in a marathon with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Tuesday’s recital was another impressive milestone, but, in Andsnes fashion, a more modest one.
His performance of the Dvorak — measured in appearance but interpretively varied, played with thorough commitment and characteristic wisdom — had the qualities of a standard-setting account. Even if “Poetic Tone Pictures” doesn’t return to Carnegie any time soon, Andsnes made a compelling argument for why it should: how, despite its unpianistic moments and longueurs, it is, in its entirety, a touching display of awe at life itself, told with a folk tune or a naïve melody, a solemn march or a sentimental dance.
The work’s expansiveness was a contrast to the recital’s first half, which was thematically focused, with a trajectory from reticence to unambiguous passion in a clear but gentle gesture toward the war in Ukraine. Andsnes fashioned something like a suite from four pieces played straight through, beginning with Alexander Vustin’s “Lamento,” from 1974, and drawing from over 200 years of classical music history.
Vustin, a Russian composer who is thought to have died of complications from Covid-19 early in the pandemic, straddled tonality and the avant-garde fashions of post-World War II music. In “Lamento,” for example, Andsnes’s left hand faintly beat chords of shifting harmonies, while his right one, more angular and unpredictable, entered with a trill before letting out atonal flourishes and chirping interjections — but never for long, like fervent ideas held back from full expression.
By the end, all that remains are the chords, at a whisper, which on Tuesday led naturally into the quiet, pained opening of Janacek’s sonata “1.X.1905, ‘From the Street,’” written in memory of a 20-year-old Czech worker who was killed — pointlessly, Janacek believed — by a German soldier during a political demonstration. Here, it was as if the sentiment of “Lamento” had surfaced in mournful lyricism and waves of rage.
Janacek destroyed the sonata’s third movement, tearing it out of the score and throwing it into a stove the day it premiered in 1906, but Andsnes programmed a fitting coda in a 2005 bagatelle by Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s pre-eminent composer. Like many Silvestrov pieces, this one was a touch too pretty, even in Andsnes’s unforced reading, but after the Janacek, its insistent serenity came off as a plea for beauty, if not for peace.
That could have sufficed for the recital’s first half. If there was a misstep on Tuesday, it was in following the bagatelle with Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, which might have provided an impassioned climax had it not been performed with such a level head. Instead, it prolonged a point that had already been made.
If anything, the slowly accumulating final chord of the bagatelle could have set up the softly arpeggiated one at the start of “Twilight Way,” the first of the “Poetic Tone Pictures.” (Hardly representational, Dvorak’s character pieces would be better served by a more literal translation from their Czech title, “Poetic Moods.”) From there, Andsnes was a masterly shepherd of this score, never losing sight of its sometimes obscured line and maintaining control of its agonizingly tricky articulations to bring out the reverent dignity of “In the Old Castle”; the sweet, I-could-have-danced-all-night shadow of a melody in “Furiant”; and the shards of light cutting through a chorale in “On the Holy Mountain.”
At Carnegie, you could understand, even appreciate, Dvorak’s pride in what he had created with these humble observations of Czech life. “It is an ominous number,” he wrote to a friend of the 13 movements, “but there were just as many Moravian duets and they, after all, managed to wander quite a way through the world! Perhaps they will do so again.” Over 130 years later, they have.
Leif Ove Andsnes
Performed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.
